South Pacific (play)

Identification Broadway musical set in World War II

Creators Music by Richard Rodgers (1902-1979); lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960); book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan (1908-1988)

Date Premiered on April 7, 1949

South Pacific is typically regarded as a musical comedy. However, it is also a sensitive treatment of racial and class prejudice, the somber nature of which is relieved by a number of comic scenes and lilting melodies. Though some critics consider its subject matter dated, this musical has been continuously staged for decades and has been adapted as a motion picture (1958), a television production (2001), and a concert version (2005), starring respectively Mitzi Gaynor, Glenn Close, and Reba McEntire as the heroine, Nellie Forbush.

It is not only its memorable songs (“Some Enchanted Evening,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” “Bali Ha’i,” “Younger than Springtime”) that establish South Pacific’s importance. In their long collaboration, Oscar Hammerstein II would write the book and lyrics first, then Richard Rodgers would compose music appropriate to the plot. Hammerstein based his story upon James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947). The musical is set on two South Pacific islands and dramatizes the reaction of American servicemen and women to a culture they would never have encountered but for World War II.

South Pacific chronicles two parallel love stories. The first is a romance between Ensign Nellie Forbush, a U.S. Navy nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Emile de Becque, an expatriate French planter. The second is between a young Marine lieutenant, Joe Cable of Philadelphia, and Liat, a Tonkinese teenager. Prejudices form serious barriers for both couples. When Nellie, reared in the segregated South, learns that Emile lived for years with a now dead “native” woman who bore him two mixed-race children, she cannot imagine sharing the rest of her life with him and the children. Joe is a Princeton graduate whose family is well-to-do, and who has a girl back home. Could he possibly take a young woman of another race—who speaks not a word of English—to Philadelphia with him after the war? The play ends with a mixture—in the classical sense—of comedy and tragedy. Nellie’s love for Emile and his children overcomes her racial prejudice, and they are united as a family. Joe’s affair with Liat ends abruptly when he is wounded during a hazardous spy mission and dies three days later.

The play was first produced on April 7, 1949, at the Majestic Theatre in New York City. It was published in that same year. South Pacific ran until January 16, 1954, after 1,925 performances. Mary Martin, the original Nellie Forbush, washed her hair on stage during every performance while singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” Joshua Logan directed and collaborated with Hammerstein on the libretto, although he was not originally credited. Whereas Hammerstein was a lifelong New Yorker, Logan was born in Texarkana, Texas, and grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. He was perfectly familiar with the southern patterns of speech appropriate to Nellie.

Impact

South Pacific won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best musical play of 1948-1949, nine Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1950. It dramatized the challenges faced by so many Americans due to the dislocations of wartime and encouraged the continuing movement of the musical theater toward more serious themes. The Broadway revival of South Pacific on April 3, 2008, is testimony to its enduring popularity.

Bibliography

Block, Geoffrey Holden. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Bloom, Ken, and Frank Vlastnik. Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2004.

Green, Stanley, ed. Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book: A Record of Their Works Together and with Other Collaborators. New York: Lynn Farnol Group, 1980.